A study finds computers are better than doctors at diagnosing and prescribing treatment. This doesn’t surprise me as diagnosing is a mechanical task of running down symptom lists and finding the most likely candidate. What the news doesn’t tell of course is computers are quite bad at getting at the symptoms. Their bed side manner is appalling, despite the great advances of siri and google natural language interfaces are still awful and computers fail at the most basic tests of detecting someone faking a cold to get out of work. So trying to get computers to diagnose people would end up in running full blood works and other such machine treatable exams for everybody.